After flying for what felt like hours, Ling Zhi finally descended near the entrance of a cave tucked into a rocky mountain. The fact that she had landed at all told Xu Yang what he needed to know — they weren't being actively chased…for now atleast. The elders had either lost the trail or decided to hold their position for now.
Ling Zhi confirmed it herself, sweeping the surrounding area with her radar artifact before tucking it away. Satisfied, she settled into the cave and closed her eyes to meditate.
Xu Yang, having nothing better to do and with a very real stomach to feed, headed out to hunt.
As a Foundation Establishment cultivator, he still had the inconvenient biological requirements of a normal human being — something the higher realm cultivators around him seemed to have entirely forgotten about. The wild boars roaming the surrounding forest were easy enough prey. They were large, plentiful, and possessed roughly the intelligence of a moderately sized rock, which made the whole affair quick and painless.
For him, at least.
He returned to the cave with his catch and reached into his storage pouch for a fire-starting talisman — only to stop.
Ling Zhi was no longer meditating. She was sitting straight, eyes open, staring at the ceiling of the cave with a frown.
Which, given her Nascent Soul cultivation, meant she was looking straight through it.
Xu Yang, uneasy said nothing and went back to preparing his meal. He had learned by now that interrupting her when she had that look was roughly equivalent to stepping on a sleeping snake.
Then she spoke.
"They're getting closer. I can feel it."
Xu Yang set down the boar. "The elders?"
"Yes." A cold light flickered briefly in her eyes before her expression returned to its usual calm. "I don't know how, but it seems they've found a way to bypass my detection artifact."
"Then how do you know they're approaching?"
"Intuition." She sat up smoothly. "And my intuition has never been wrong about danger."
She looked at him then — that particular look she had that meant a decision had already been made and his input was neither required nor welcome.
"Xu Yang. Don't resist. Get into my beast storage pouch."
Before the protest had even fully formed in his throat, his body was already moving.
His legs carried him forward without his permission. His hands lowered themselves cooperatively. And then, with all the dignity of a man walking calmly off a cliff, his body stepped directly into the open pouch.
He tried to stop. The moment he did, a sharp, splitting pain spread somewhere deep in his skull — the sensation was of his soul threatening to crack right down the middle.
He stopped resisting immediately.
*Right*, he thought distantly, as the pouch sealed around him and the world went dark. *The contract.*
He had almost forgotten. Almost convinced himself over the past weeks of running and surviving together that the contract was merely a formality — that he was following her out of pragmatism rather than compulsion. That the choice was still, in some meaningful sense, his.
The pain had been a useful reminder. Crisp. Educational.
He had no choice.
He sat in the darkness for a moment, letting that reality settle over him with fresh weight. Then he exhaled, collected himself, and reached out with his divine sense to observe what was happening outside.
---
The elder was old — white-bearded, lean to the point where it seemed like malnutrition— and with an absolutely furious face. He hung in the air above the treeline like a storm that had taken human form, and the sword qi erupting from him carved the landscape apart in broad, devastating arcs. Each strike was powerful enough to level the cave they had been resting in moments before.
Ling Zhi moved through it like water.
She didn't fight back. She didn't need to. She simply dodged, fluid and unhurried, letting each strike pass near enough to feel the wind from it. Which was impressive, Xu Yang had to admit. Soul Fusion realm sword qi wasn't something you casually weaved through.
Then she reached into her robes and produced a talisman.
Then another.
Then a third.
Xu Yang recognized the markings on all three immediately — Heaven Deceiving Sect talismans, each one worth more spirit stones than he'd likely earn in a few decades. The Heaven Deceiving Sect was one of the few powers in the Eastern Domain capable of matching their own sect's influence, and their talismans were legendary for exactly this kind of situation.
She activated all three simultaneously.
The first concealed her aura entirely — wiping her spiritual signature and aura from the world as if she had never existed.
The second rendered her invisible to any cultivator below the peak of Soul Fusion visually.
The third was the extraordinary one. It dissolved her physical body into pure spiritual energy, allowing her to pass through solid matter as though she were made of light.
Combined, the effect was staggering. Even Xu Yang, connected to her through the pouch and tracking her with his divine sense, could barely follow her movement — just a constantly shifting blur of scenes as she moved at incomprehensible speed, phasing through trees and earth itself.
The elder felt the same way. He couldn't pinpoint her location anymore but he could figure out the general direction.
So he stopped trying to pinpoint her location.
Instead, he simply began destroying everything.
Sword energy rained down in every direction — blind, sweeping, indiscriminate — tearing through hundreds of meters of forest in broad, catastrophic arcs. It was the cultivation world's version of setting fire to a haystack to find the needle. Crude yet Effective.
Xu Yang watched it all from inside the pouch, quietly impressed despite everything.
Then, because he apparently had no self-preservation instinct whatsoever, he opened a line of communication through his divine sense.
"As expected of my Master. Truly, what problem exists that you cannot solve? If I weren't currently stuffed inside a pouch like preserved vegetables, I would be building a shrine in your honour right now. Perhaps two shrines. One for each—"
"Shut up."
Her voice cut through the divine sense connection like a blade.
"Your constant transmission is helping him narrow down my general direction even more. If you say one more word, I will throw the pouch at him and let you sort it out yourself."
Xu Yang went very quiet very quickly.
"…Understood. *cough* I'll properly apologise to you when you let me out."
A short, sharp sound came through the connection she let out an, exasperated laugh tinged with impatience.
"I'll make sure you apologize plenty, for several lifetimes at-least."
So he shut up soon after and just observed from inside…..only he himself knew, if he was truly was ignorant about the fact that his divine sense communication with Ling Zhi might cause her to get caught.
He continued to watch in silence.
---
The chase stretched on longer than it should have.
Three Heaven Deceiving Sect talismans running simultaneously was an extraordinary usage of resources, yes, but more critically of divine sense and spiritual energy. Maintaining all three required a level of sustained concentration that bordered on the inhuman, and even Ling Zhi had limits.
She slipped.
Just once. For a fraction of a second — a hairline crack in her control that let a thread of her aura bleed through the concealment.
It was enough.
The elder's next strike was precise. A single blade of sword qi, focused to a razor edge, caught her left arm cleanly and separated it at the shoulder.
There was no blood.
Her arm dissolved into dispersed spiritual energy — a consequence of her current transformed state — and simply ceased to exist as a physical thing. No injury in the conventional sense.
But she clenched her teeth anyway.
Not from the loss of the arm. From the anger of having slipped at all.
Xu Yang saw it happen through his divine sense and said nothing. For once in his life, he understood that nothing he could say would help.
Then, through the blur of constantly shifting scenery, he caught something in the distance.
The cliffs.
The domain-separating valley stretched across the horizon like a crack in the world itself— vast, silent, and absolute. The sight of it hit Xu Yang with a wave of involuntary relief so strong he almost embarrassed himself.
He didn't know how she planned to cross it. He didn't bother himself thinking about it though— since she had a solution for everything.
---
The moment she began approaching the cliffs, the drain on spiritual energy started.
Even from inside the pouch, Xu Yang could feel it — an oppressive, invisible pull that went after spiritual energy like a drain going after water. And she was still nearly eight hundred meters from the cliff's edge. Whatever waited inside the valley itself was beyond imagination.
The three talismans began flickering. Maintaining all of them under this kind of energy drain was no longer possible.
One by one, they started to fail.
The elder felt it immediately. His pursuit sharpened, his strikes growing more focused, more calculated — the blind rampage replaced by calculated strikes.
Then Ling Zhi reached into her robes one final time.
She produced a pendant — small, transparent, almost delicate-looking. Carved into its surface was a sparrow in mid-flight, rendered in extraordinary detail.
The elder stopped.
Xu Yang had never seen that expression on a Soul Fusion cultivator's face before. It took him a moment to identify it.
Fear.
"You—" The elder's voice came out wrong. Fractured at the edges. "That's not possible. We killed her entire family. Every last one. We cast a bloodline curse — there should have been no survivors — how are you—" His voice rose sharply. "*Who are you?! SPEAK!*"
Ling Zhi looked back at him over her shoulder.
She sneered.
"Not every connection in this world runs through blood, old man." Her voice was perfectly level. "Unlike what your phony sect leader seems to believe."
She activated the pendant.
A translucent barrier bloomed around her, pale and luminous — and the crushing pull of the valley simply stopped. Her spiritual energy held steady. The drain, which should have been stripping her to nothing within moments, couldn't find purchase.
Even Xu Yang, watching through his divine sense, went still with disbelief.
*What is that thing?*
Ling Zhi turned back toward the valley and stepped forward.
"If I ever come back here," she said quietly — to herself, to the air, to no one in particular — "I will kill every last one of them. Down to the ninth generation."
She said it the same way someone might say when talking about the weather.
Then she took flight toward the valley, the translucent barrier holding firm around her, and crossed into the space between domains.
Behind her, the elder stood at the cliff's edge and did not follow. He stood there for a long moment, the wind pulling at his robes, staring at her with an expression Xu Yang couldn't fully read through the fading range of his divine sense.
Then the elder reached into his robes and produced a communication talisman.
Whatever message he sent — wherever it was going — Xu Yang had the distinct feeling that their departure from Eastern Domain was going to be considerably less quiet than either of them had hoped.